David Bowie rejected Danny Boyle’s ‘wonderful’ biopic

Danny Boyle has revealed that David Bowie turned down a “wonderful” script for a biopic on the musical icon that he planned to direct.

Written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, who Boyle has previously worked with on Millions, the film would have focused on the relationship between Bowie and Iggy Pop. Alas, when Boyle approached Bowie about the project in the summer of 2012 he turned him down flat.

“Frank and I were working on a David Bowie script,” Boyle told Empire Magazine, via List. “I talked to Bowie about it at the Olympic Games and went to see him. He didn’t really want to do anything at that time and I didn’t really understand why.”

Bowie was diagnosed with liver cancer in mid 2014, which he died of in January, 2016. “It wasn’t clear to anybody he was ill,” added Boyle. “All he was saying was, ‘I don’t want to do anything in the past. I am working on stuff for the future’.”

Unfortunately, Boyle doesn’t believe he will ever return to the project. “I’m not sure if we’ll come back to it. But he is a particular British person I’d want to study. Frank’s was a wonderful script about the relationship between him and Iggy Pop.”

Bowie rejected David Bowie’s biopic at the 2012 Olympics

The version of events was seemingly confirmed by Cottrell-Boyce, who took to Twitter to link to a story on his proposed Bowie biopic.

Clearly the Oscar winning director has some regrets about the biopic not working out, because when asked which films he regrets not doing, Boyle added, “The Bowie film we talked about … And the Bond actually, because our version of it was good. Those are the two that kind of haunt you. They could have been really good.”

Boyle left James Bond 25 back in August over “creative differences.” However, his latest film Yesterday, which has been written by Richard Curtis and is set in a world where only one musician can remember the work of The Beatles, is due out on June 28.

Meanwhile, Stardust, a David Bowie biopic starring Johnny Flynn, is in the works. But it won’t have any of his original music and will just revolve around his 1971 tour of the US.